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Tesla Adds Larry Ellison and Kathleen Wilson-Thompson as Board Directors

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Re: Tesla Adds Larry Ellison and Kathleen Wilson-Thompson as Board Directors

#311

Post by hndamien »

theptip wrote: post #245
hndamien wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think “every expert” may be stretching the truth, unless you are proclaiming that Tesla has no experts working on this.

They said > every expert in the field unconnected to Tesla

The edit button is a wonderful tool.

Besides, the fact that I can drive my car relying primarily on two eyes and a brain suggests that it must be possible to extract and process the information to drive a car with stereo vision, and without LIDAR. LIDAR may become cheap and small enough that it should be added purely from a safety perspective - more better information is better. However, I think plenty of experts would agree that theoretically it is possible without.

Here are some experts that think it works without LIDAR, so you may wish to edit “every”. https://arxiv.org/pdf/1708.09839.pdf

Re: Tesla Adds Larry Ellison and Kathleen Wilson-Thompson as Board Directors

#312

Post by bogomipz »

joefourier wrote: post #259
darkpuma wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "Elon stretches the truth constantly." That's putting it gently. Putting aside his twitter spats, Tesla is still prominently advertising "Full Self-Driving Hardware on All Cars" [0] even though their cars do not contain LIDAR, which essentially every expert in the field unconnected to Tesla seems to agree is necessary to implement Level 5 self driving cars[1][2]. [0] https://www.tesla.com/autopilot [1] https://www.…

Level 5 self driving is still theoretical at this point, and theoretically speaking, there is no reason to assume LIDAR is absolutely necessary for it. Computer vision based pipelines are theoretically capable of providing the same depth information as LIDAR, using stereo, camera arrays or even monocular SLAM. The main obstacle for self-driving car is much more on the processing side than on the sensor side. After al…

>"Computer vision based pipelines are theoretically capable of providing the same depth information as LIDAR, using stereo, camera arrays or even monocular SLAM."

Are there any companies that are taking the purely computer vision approach then?

>"(IIRC they have an Nvidia X2 and GP106 onboard, which only have a total of about 4 SPFP TFLOPs)."

Can you say how far off is that compute power from what is actually required for a "full self-driving" car?

Re: Tesla Adds Larry Ellison and Kathleen Wilson-Thompson as Board Directors

#313

Post by justinclift »

Sniffnoy wrote: post #270
darkpuma wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe, I'm not sure. But I know I don't trust his idea of "good for the human beings inside Tesla cars, and the human beings on the road with Tesla cars."

I mean, these are related. If Tesla cars aren't safe for the people inside, people won't buy them. If they're not safe for others, lawsuits will follow. Bad for these are bad for shareholders too. But certain people will ignore this to their own detriment, and I expect Ellison to be one of them.

> If Tesla cars aren't safe for the people inside, people won't buy them.

The theory is good, but in practise it doesn't always work out that way.

As an example, take IBM. In IT circles they're very well known - for ~10+ years now - as an incompetent organisation, with an aggressive sales force targeting high level (non-technical) execs.

Their only real interest in being scoring short term sales wins, but their ability to deliver results for any useful length of time rarely lines up.

In theory, IBM should be having trouble closing sales these days. That's the equivalent of "If Tesla cars aren't safe for the people inside, people won't buy them".

However, that doesn't seem to be the case.

And with IBM, when things go badly wrong (very common), IBM just breaks out the lawyers and attempts to shift blame. eg "it's the customers fault / hackers did it / competitor did it" (etc)

Telsla could unfortunately drive down the same dark road (for their customers).

Having Ellison anywhere involved is really not a good sign. :(

Re: Tesla Adds Larry Ellison and Kathleen Wilson-Thompson as Board Directors

#314

Post by pdxww »

Tomte wrote: post #191

Fascinating. Kathleen Wilson-Thompson is a senior manager at a huge American company, still there doesn't seem to be a Wikipedia article about her.

"Senior manager" isn't a remarkable achievement. It's just a role or position in a company that needs to be filled in. She happened to be the one who got picked (for various reasons). If she founded a company with $1B profits a year, it would be a different story.

Re: Tesla Adds Larry Ellison and Kathleen Wilson-Thompson as Board Directors

#315

Post by darkpuma »

hndamien wrote: post #311
theptip wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They said > every expert in the field unconnected to Tesla

The edit button is a wonderful tool. Besides, the fact that I can drive my car relying primarily on two eyes and a brain suggests that it must be possible to extract and process the information to drive a car with stereo vision, and without LIDAR. LIDAR may become cheap and small enough that it should be added purely from a safety perspective - more better information is better. However, I think plenty of experts wou…

Even if they can make it work, they note that Tesla's hardware is still inadequate. Tesla boast 8 cameras providing 360 degree coverage, but the authors of that paper are unimpressed:

>"The autopilot feature [19] in cars produced by Tesla Motors enables autonomous driving on highways through a combination of a forward-looking camera and radar. Due to the limited field-of-view, these cars cannot execute autonomous driving in cities which require surround perception."

So while you may have found some experts who think Level 5 automation can be done using only CV, you've only reinforced my main point that Elon Musk is not a trustworthy person.

Re: Tesla Adds Larry Ellison and Kathleen Wilson-Thompson as Board Directors

#316

Post by ethn »

pdxww wrote: post #308
ethn wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Human eyes don't work anything like cameras. The eye processes information that isn't just intensities of photons and their wave lengths—which is the only information collected by cameras. See Walter Pitt's "What the Frog Eyes Tell the Frog Brain" for an introduction: 'Fundamentally it shows that the eye speaks to the brain in a language already highly organized and interpreted, instead of transmitting some more or l…

A simple abstraction here: we put two high-quality monitors before our eyes and get all the data from them. Can we continue driving this way? Absolutely. This means that no matter how our eyes actually work, an array of RGB pixels is enough. I'd go further and say that a 64 x 64 grayscale camera at 10 fps is enough to drive a car. The real magic happens in the brain that reconstructs the 3D model and predicts what ha…

That is an analogy not an abstraction but if you had read the paper or the single quote I provided, you would know that even relatively simple eyes (such as those of the frogs which cannot see still objects) don't only process a distribution of light intensity and frequency. The eye measures other information that is lost by the camera including photon phase, arrival time, polarization, orbital angular momentum, linear momentum, and probably many more measurements. More so, this is done by specialized organelles of the eye rather than by the brain.

Re: Tesla Adds Larry Ellison and Kathleen Wilson-Thompson as Board Directors

#317

Post by phs318u »

wisecommentator wrote: post #302
gameswithgo wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What did Larry envision, exactly?

Where should I start? Ellison made the first commercial implementation of SQL. (Granted, Ellison didn't invent SQL, but he instantly recognized the importance of it and made it commercially successful, just like Steve Jobs didn't invent graphical interfaces, but instantly recognized its importance when he saw it Xerox Parc.) Ellison has been talking about what he called "Network Computing" since the mid 1990s. He sai…

I think you'll find that Ellison's "vision" of network computing was literally acquired when Oracle bought Sun Microsystems. Sun's fifth employee, John Gage, coined the phrase "the network is the computer" in 1984 [0].

Ken Olsen (Digital Equipment Corp) is also reputed to have shared this view as far back as 1987 [1].

[0] https://www.computerworld.com.au/slideshow/334210/pictures-r...

[1] https://slidex.tips/download/don-t-forget-the-network

EDITED to fix URL [1]

Re: Tesla Adds Larry Ellison and Kathleen Wilson-Thompson as Board Directors

#318

Post by ATsch »

Tomte wrote: post #191

Fascinating. Kathleen Wilson-Thompson is a senior manager at a huge American company, still there doesn't seem to be a Wikipedia article about her.

I think the issue with these kinds of things is generally coming up with enough citable facts to create a full article. This seems easier with actors and musicians than with executives.

Re: Tesla Adds Larry Ellison and Kathleen Wilson-Thompson as Board Directors

#319

Post by tomhoward »

pdxww wrote: post #314
Tomte wrote: post #191

Fascinating. Kathleen Wilson-Thompson is a senior manager at a huge American company, still there doesn't seem to be a Wikipedia article about her.

"Senior manager" isn't a remarkable achievement. It's just a role or position in a company that needs to be filled in. She happened to be the one who got picked (for various reasons). If she founded a company with $1B profits a year, it would be a different story.

This was downvoted, perhaps because people read your comment as being dismissive or contemptuous of her achievements, which I don't think you really meant to do.

I think the point you meant to make is that being a senior manager at a big company doesn't rate highly enough to warrant a dedicated Wikipedia page - which is more a comment on Wikipedia's notability criteria.

Let's agree that it is impressive and commendable for her to have achieved such a level of seniority at Walgreen's.

Re: Tesla Adds Larry Ellison and Kathleen Wilson-Thompson as Board Directors

#320

Post by wisecommentator »

phs318u wrote: post #317
wisecommentator wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where should I start? Ellison made the first commercial implementation of SQL. (Granted, Ellison didn't invent SQL, but he instantly recognized the importance of it and made it commercially successful, just like Steve Jobs didn't invent graphical interfaces, but instantly recognized its importance when he saw it Xerox Parc.) Ellison has been talking about what he called "Network Computing" since the mid 1990s. He sai…

I think you'll find that Ellison's "vision" of network computing was literally acquired when Oracle bought Sun Microsystems. Sun's fifth employee, John Gage, coined the phrase "the network is the computer" in 1984 [0]. Ken Olsen (Digital Equipment Corp) is also reputed to have shared this view as far back as 1987 [1]. [0] https://www.computerworld.com.au/slideshow/334210/pictures-r... [1] https://slidex.tips/download…

>I think you'll find that Ellison's "vision" of network computing was literally acquired when Oracle bought Sun Microsystems.

That’s incorrect. Acquisition of Sun cane much later. “Network is the computer” is very different from Ellison’s Network Computing because in Ellison’s vision complexity is centralized and end-user devices are glorified dumb terminals which is very different from Sun’s “Network is the computer”

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